“Want to come to my website and say that Michelle Obama is a ‘tranny’? Want to call her a ‘mullie’ and compare her to Chewbacca? Have a desire to call her a ‘snuff lipped Sasquatch’? No problem! Come on over; make yourself at home. I’ll just sit here silently while you do your thing.” – Tucker Carlson.

Want to go to a website where the article takes a joke where everyone is smiling and having a good time on a late night comedy show and distorts it into someone “scolding” someone else?

Then, after that, in the comments, the First Lady of the United States is called an “ape woman,” Moochelle, “a tranny with a ball sack,” and a “snuff lipped Sasquatch.” Michelle Obama is compared to Chewbacca. She’s called a “mullie.” People make jokes about “not wanting to know what she puts in her mouth.” She’s called a “commie bitch.”

And that’s just in the first three pages of comments. There are 12 of them. I didn’t read them all.

These guys feel right at home in the Daily Caller’s comment section.

Want to go to a website like that? Click that link up there right above Tucker Carlson’s stupid bow-tie and mosey on over to the Daily Caller, where racism and hate are alive, well, and patting themselves on the back repeatedly. It’s not like these comments are being shouted down. It’s not like they’re being removed by the website. It’s been over a day in some cases, and those comments sit there proudly, some of them with more than 20 other people “liking” the comment in support of the racism or hate.

And weirdly, many of the Chewbacca comments are repeats. It seems to be like a real thing conservatives say openly about her. Like it’s a meme or something. I had no idea it even existed. They have photo mock-ups and everything.

These people have jobs? These people are employed? It’s just so unimaginable that this kind of thing exists in places where people openly accept it. There’s barely any criticism of the blatant racism and hate at all of this on the site. There’s two or three people criticizing it in the comments, but I’m one of them. And there are hundreds of comments and scores of commenters. The rest of it goes unchecked and encouraged by others.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that you would find language like that at a website which is proudly conservative and backs the Republican Party on almost every issue. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that the commenters are all in support of the GOP and conservatives. I’m sure there’s no correlation between the racism and the conservative movement, and I’m doubly sure all that racism has nothing to do with why so many conservatives are incensed by the fact that Barack Hussein Obama is their president. I’m sure it’s all one big coincidence.

——————

And while I’m here, where’s Twitchy now? Where’s Twitchy to document all of this “leftist hate?” Someone make sure to contact Michelle Malkin and let her know how terrible these leftists are.

Watch as the president, for the second time in his term in office, is interrupted in the middle of giving a speech like no other president has ever been interrupted before.

Joe Wilson, who has the self control of a small child.

First it was Joe Wilson (R-SC) who screamed, “YOU LIE!” at Obama during Obama’s State of the Union address. That had never happened in the recorded history of this country. And, it wasn’t like those “Code Pink” idiots who interrupt Republican politicians during speeches. Let me repeat: Code Pink are a bunch of assholes for the way they go about getting their message into the media. Those are extreme activists. They’re a part of a vast, unsupported minority.

But, when Obama was interrupted during his SotU, that was a sitting member of the United States House of Representatives screaming at the president. It wasn’t some fringe group. It was an officially elected member of the Republican establishment. Sure, he apologized afterwards, but then he went and raised money off of what he did. He raised money off of his disrespect for the president. That’s how sorry he really was.

And now, a few years later, we have another first. Another time the president is interrupted in the middle of a speech. This time, it wasn’t a member of Congress, but it also wasn’t a member of Code Pink or the Tea Party or PETA. It was a “professional reporter” for the hyper-conservative blog “The Daily Caller.” His name is Neil Munro, and he is a professional member of the conservative media. He gets paid to report things that conservatives want to be told. He was given a pass to have the ability to cover the president’s speech, and he used that privilege to disrespect the president by interrupting him mid-speech, just like Joe Wilson did.

Neil Munro, who is as professional as a waiter sneezing into your dinner. Photo outright stolen from NPR.

Whether or not Wilson or Munro are factually correct in their assertions is irrelevant. They may be, but as a politician and a media member respectively, they have to know that the way to disagree is not to be disrespectful. But they seemingly don’t think this president is deserving of the same kind of respect the last 43 presidents have received (I wonder what’s different about this one…?) This is pure disrespect, and it’s not coming from extremist groups who hold up signs at rallies of less than a hundred people. It’s not coming from idiots on Twitter who aren’t educated or civilized enough to form a coherent thought.* It’s coming directly from the conservative establishment. It’s coming directly from the people who are professional representatives of conservatism.

And conservatives have the gall to claim that it is the president who is dividing the country? It’s the elected representatives and the paid professionals of the “right” who are setting the example for inappropriate and disrespectful behavior.

Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Mark Levin do nothing but trash the president all day on their radio shows. And you know what? That’s fine. That’s fair game. But, it also sets the stage for these kinds of outbursts which have heretofore not been seen in American politics. One side of the argument is dragging the American media and politics further into the gutter, and it’s people like Joe Wilson and Neil Munro.

Update: Munro and the Daily Caller have published their reaction, and needless to say, it’s laughable. From Munro: ““I always go to the White House prepared with questions for our president. I timed the question believing the president was closing his remarks, because naturally I have no intention of interrupting the President of the United States.”

Watch that video again. There is no way you think Obama is finished, especially given the way Obama speaks. He constantly pauses for effect (and likely to gather his thoughts). And even if he did think Obama was finished, Munro interrupted consistently afterwards. It wasn’t a one time, “Oops, thought you were done. Sorry,” kind of interaction. It was a repeated interruption, so much so that Obama had to remind Munro once that it wasn’t time for questions, and then AGAIN that it wasn’t time for an argument in the middle of the president’s speech. To say he had no intention of interrupting the president is laughable, to say the least.

Then there’s Tucker Carlson’s point about Sam Donaldson and Ronald Reagan. Watch the difference here.

Tucker Carlson, muppet.

Reagan was CLEARLY done. How do we know? Because he said he was going to let someone else (AG Meese) take the podium. That’s what people do when they’ve finished with their remarks. Compare that to Obama, who had simply paused for a moment. For Carlson to even attempt to create an equivalency here is preposterous. Rather than own their mistake and apologize, they’ll double down on it. Why? Because the conservative media has created such a toxic atmosphere for this president that they know they’ll be able to make more money out of insulting him than being respectful. And insulting him to his face? Even better. Pretty soon, just like Joe Wilson, they’ll be selling t-shirts and raising cash. Just pathetic.

In Howard Kurtz’s April 2nd piece (worth a read) about how the conservative media is having a difficult time warming up to Mitt Romney, Rich Lowry (editor of conservative magazine National Review) made a statement I found to be refreshingly honest about the way they view the Obama presidency. Lowry said:

“There’s no question it would be better for everyone’s place in the marketplace to have another Obama term.”

Rich Lowry.

And that’s it. That’s the strength of the conservative media: they’re capitalizing on, and making their money by, trashing a president millions of Americans found repulsive from the day he entered national politics. The job of any media organization is to secure a place for itself in the marketplace. Putting forth ideas and principles is one thing, but the main objective of these media organizations is to make a profit. There are many ways to do that, but Lowry hits on something important here: he would make more money with a second Obama term than he would if Romney (or Santorum [Ha!]) wins.

Why is that?

This is an example of terrorism, apparently.

There is a strain of people in American society who so hate this president that they will devour anything negative said about him. They hate him not for his policies, but simply because of who (or to them, what) he is. Sure, now many of the people who hate Obama point to his “failed policies” or his attack on their freedom or his “Chicago style politics” or other such nonsensical talking points, but this anti-Obama hatred pre-dated his presidency. The irrational hate always existed. He’s a Muslim, he wasn’t born here, he “pals around with terrorists,” he has a radical pastor, he’s a communist, he reads from a teleprompter, Barack HUSSEIN Obama, or the most remarkable and straightforward one: the terrorist fist jab. Whatever the impetus behind that irrationality was, it’s myriad. One aspect of that irrationality, however, is impossible to deny: some, if not much, of the resistance to Obama is due to his race. That’s not to say all conservatives or Republicans are racist, and it’s not to say that all opposition to Obama is at its core racist. Those things are not true. However, it is myopic to deny there are still millions of racists in this country and to deny that they all have a special hate for this black president. If Barack Obama were white, there is no way on the planet that anyone would have thought a “fist bump” was a “terrorist fist jab.” There’s no way that would have happened.

This is just Christmas, apparently.

Given this groundswell of antipathy, some of it racially based, some of it policy based and some of it based in fear, it would have been stupid for conservative websites and conservative politicians not to attempt to capitalize on it.

Very quickly, the conservative media (mirrored by actual politicians in Washington) realized that as long as they disagreed President Obama and attacked everything the president did and everything he said, there was going to be a large part of the population who would support them. These people may not have been in the mainstream, but for internet sites, you don’t need to be part of the mainstream to be able to click on a few links and drive ad revenue. In this case, the fringe is large enough to support the conservative media because the fringe is so incensed with the idea of an Obama presidency. As long as these conservative websites keep up a daily attack on Obama and all of his surrogates, and as long as they don’t alienate the more moderate part of their conservative readership by being openly racist, they will make money. They will generate hits. They’ll be relevant.

So it’s not a surprise that there is unanimity in the conservative media against this president. It’s very easy to play to the fringe by keeping up a constant attack and playing to the most vile aspects of our American politics. Far right conservative websites have grown remarkably over the last few years. The Daily Caller was founded in the middle of this presidency. The Breitbart sites have exploded. The Blaze is brand new.

And all of it is built on one premise: hate the president, make money. Hating Obama isn’t just politics for them; it’s a business.

“There’s no question it would be better for everyone’s place in the marketplace to have another Obama term.”

Surely you’ve heard something of the “pink slime” that supermarkets around the country have begun removing from all their ground beef? McDonald’s has also seen fit to remove the stuff from its burgers after the public found out what it was. If you don’t know what it is, it’s what they call the leftovers from the cow which were not fit for human consumption after they are made fit for human consumption. How do they take these previously unusable scraps which were used for dog food and cooking oil and turn them into hamburger meat?

“Heat them, spin them in a centrifuge to separate the tiny particles of meat from fat, then treat the product with a puff of ammonium hydroxide gas to kill bacteria.”

When people heard that their hamburgers were filled with ammonia-treated, centrifuged, and heated meat bits, they got kind of grossed out. A backlash started. Supermarkets and fast food restaurants decided to stop using the “pink slime.” This was bad news for pink slime producers, though (one of the just filed for bankruptcy), so many lobbyists for the food industry started to push back. Where can a powerful lobbyist for the food industry go to defend the substitution of ammonia treated leftovers for real beef? The Daily Caller, it turns out. The argument?

“But just because something is ‘gross’ doesn’t make it bad. Plenty of cultures eat bugs, which are good protein sources. Walk into a restaurant in China and you might find some congealed duck blood or chicken offal. There’s a reason blood sausage, a European favorite, has the name it has.”

Don’t worry, America. People around the world eat bugs, the least you could do is accept that the food industry will sell you meat treated with ammonia without telling you. And if you’re ever really worried that the food industry might putting stuff in your food that you don’t want without your knowledge, the conservative website The Daily Caller is more than willing to let those industry apologists tell you to not freak out and try some roaches. I hear they’re high in protein.

“Entering the third week of wall-to-wallTrayvon Martin coverage, the narrative has emerged that there is a left vs. right dynamic to the way this story has been covered. Indeed, I have traced the way some online conservatives (particularly The Daily Caller) have turned against Trayvon Martin, in my view as an expression of their hatred of President Obama. But is this really a left versus right thing? I looked at the Trayvon Martin coverage by conservative media like Fox News, The Blaze, The Bigs, and Hot Air, and found a complicated picture.”

The picture may look complicated to the writer of this article (Tommy Christopher), but if you really want to know what’s going on in this case, look into the comment sections of those five sites he lists.

It’s the most vile, racist, and disgusting stuff you’re ever going to see, and the right wing sites who host those comments turn a blind eye to it. I think Christopher does a good job in explaining how those sites (and FNC) have covered the issue, but the failure of these right wing organizations to call out their commenters for their insane racism is an important part of this equation. Those sites know they can’t call for a stop to the racism because they know that many of their readers and supporters are unabashed bigots.